I wish I had been there.

[fixthecopier]

It made me laugh when he told me , so I thought I would share.
At the end of a really suck ass week, I find my self sitting on the floor of a building, taking the front off of a bizhub 500 because someone had jammed the toner bottle in so hard, I had to take apart the bottle holder to get it out. While I am doing this, the customer started telling me how he had tried to spare me a simple call this morning when the bizhub C30P printer I had sold them came up with a message that the waste toner needed changing. He decided he could clean it out himself so he got out a standard house type vacume and proceded to suck it out. It worked well, no problem. Now to clean out the canister on the vac. After looking at what was in it and how fine and dusty it was , he decided it would not be a good idea to dump it in a trash can. After pondering the situation, he got a great idea. He would dump it in the toilet and flush it away. After pouring the contents in the toilet, he noticed how it all just sat on top of the water. So then he flushed. Then he watched with shock as the pile of toner turned into a multi colored cloud of dust that rose from the toilet like a geni fleeing a bottle. The toilet, the walls, the ceiling and the people doing the deed were coated with a light dusting of the rainbow colored cloud. He said it took an hour to clean the bathroom. I wish I had been there.

[Baphomet]

That's funny. I tried to flush waste toner before myself. Fortunately it was not an assisted flush toilet so I did not get the blast of air, but it was a pain in the butt to get it all to go down. Now I carry a supply of trash bags in case I need them. (I don't like to waste the space in my vac bag with waste toner).

[blackcat4866]

I love that! I can just picture the ghostly cloud arising from the bowl, and your poor customer with his big eyes!

My story is not as good, but very messy:
I once had a Mita DC3285 placed in the mangers office at a retail store (to remain anonymous). Anyone remember the 3285? The toner cartridge was basically rectangular like a brick, with a mylar seal across the whole bottom, and a small magnet in the one corner, so the machine knew a cartridge was installed. If the customer ignored the arrow markings on the cartridge they could (with some effort) force the cartridge in backwards. The little broken pieces of plastic would carve up the foam roller pretty quickly if not removed.

With the cartridge in backwards the magnet does not line up with the reed sensor and says "Install Toner Cartridge". My persistent customer decides that maybe one cartridge is not enough, and breaks cartrdge #2 in the same way. Still "Install Toner Cartridge"! The damn greedy machine wants another cartridge! So he installs the third toner cartidge. At this point he thinks there may be a problem.

He has filled the entire imaging area with black toner and its poured out ~ a quart of toner onto the sheet bypass through the cooling vents. An idea dawns on him. There is a whole shelf of these powerful wet/dry vacs only 20 feet from his office door. He grabs one of the vacuums and starts vacuuming. This is where I enter the scene....

It was like walking into an old black & white movie. I walk into the managers office (~15' x 20') to see a nice even gray haze covering every surface. The ceiling, the walls, the floor, the windows, the furniture, everything. I can tell he didn't leave the office immediately. These is a butt print on the office chair, and a few of the papers have been moved on the desk to reveal clean spots.

It took 3 hours to clean this up. There were 13 broken cartridge corners in the hopper (at least 7 incorrectly installed cartridges). I cleaned a circular area 6' around the copier. When it was time to leave, the manager "was too busy" to sign my invoice. =^..^=

[prntrfxr]

I wish I had been there.

I wish we had this stuff on film...LOL.